Mooney, Paul James Interview

Good afternoon. Today’s Friday, 7th May 2021. I am Lyn Sturm, and I have been given the privilege of interviewing Paul Mooney, Chief Winemaker for the Mission Estate Winery in Taradale. Over to you.

Right. Okay, I was born in Clyde in Central Otago, and I was one of eight children. My father there was a local barrister and solicitor and my mother was a homemaker. I lived there ‘til I was eleven, until we shifted to Hamilton, at which point my father was appointed to the Bench as a Magistrate.

So the school I went to in Alexandra was St Gerard’s Primary School, and it was run by the Sisters of Mercy, the nuns. When we moved to Hamilton I started at Intermediate … Melville Intermediate … for two years. From there I went to St John’s College for a year, and then I went on to Sacred Heart College for three years where I was a boarder. On finishing at Sacred Heart in Auckland, in my last year at school I decided not to carry on, and I went to Waikato University instead; I studied for a Bachelor’s degree in science and my major subject was physics. Once I completed that … took me four years to get that degree, so on completion [it] took me six or so months to find a permanent job. And I got a job working for … at that time it was the Ministry of Transport … and they administered two meteorological stations. The Met [Meteorological] Service was under the Ministry of Transport, but they ran two meteorological observatories, one at Campbell Island, one on Raoul. So I went for a year down to Campbell Island, on that expedition from ‘76 to ‘77. So I did work; because I did study physics I was like a geophysics technician. And I worked there on the island for what was then the DSIR, [Department of Scientific and Industrial Research] and I also looked after a couple of the experiments run by the Physics departments of Auckland and [?] University.

So I came back from there after a year and got a brief job for a multi-national company called [??] which I’ll just call a [?] service organisation. I didn’t stick with that; I was a trainee, but I didn’t hang out there, so after about three or four months I left. And then I was going to go back to university to do post graduate studies, but then the opportunity of this position at Mission Estate came on so I took that opportunity, and that was in 1979. So I started here at the Mission in March 1979, and since then I’ve worked at the same place, the same company, since 1979. The company is owned by the Society of Mary, who’ve owned this business for over a hundred and fifty years or something.

I’m amazed.

And they’re still the shareholder. So this company is probably one of the oldest companies in New Zealand still running under the same shareholder, and it’s been producing and selling wine since the 1870s. Yeah, it’s been actually selling wine commercially since the 1870s, so that’s a hundred and forty years it’s been actually selling wine, you know, under this Mission brand. So it’s quite a unique situation, and it’s an organisation the Marist Fathers set up; they came here as missionaries, and they set up a lot of Maori missions in New Zealand and also sent missionaries to the Islands, and even places as far away as South America, like Peru and Brazil. And they also set up five [or] six secondary boys’ schools in New Zealand, so Pompallier College, and you’ve got St John’s College here; you’ve got St Patrick’s Kilbirnie and St Patrick’s Silverstream, and you’ve got St Bede’s in Christchurch, and I think there’s another one in Timaru. And when I arrived here in ‘79 we had a Seminary here; they operated a Seminary where men were trained to be priests, and there was something like about sixty or so students at that time and there was an academic staff of about six or eight, and half a dozen Brothers as well. They called them Lay Brothers. So my old boss, [Stuart Cuttance] who [whom] you’ve interviewed, was one of the Lay Brothers, and he was a winemaker prior to myself. And I was under his tutelage for three years, and then he went off; and I think his aspiration was always to do missionary work, so he realised this aspiration of his to do missionary work. I think when he came here to live a religious life, I think that was his … perhaps, goal, but I think at the time they needed a winemaker and as he was trained as a pharmacist he had the right qualifications to actually run the winery. And he was quite a bright sort of man, and innovative. So he started as a winemaker in the early sixties I think, and succeeded Brother Basil; and he introduced the first Méthode Traditionelle in New Zealand, amongst many other sort of innovations.

So – next I married; I met my wife actually back in 1981 … to be future wife, but I didn’t marry until about 1988. We were married for about twenty-five years, but she contracted a very, very aggressive cancer and passed away back in 2012. Meanwhile we’ve had five children, so yep – I’ve five children. So that is the basic guts of my background … my history.

So I’ve been working here since … yeah, 1979, and the production’s grown from you know, quite a small base to a reasonable size now; I think when we started here we were probably only doing about two or three hundred thousand litres, but we’re probably about ten times that now, the volume that we’re putting through here, but we’re not a big wine company.

You’re just going along nicely, so to speak, not trying to get up the top of the market sort of thing?

Oh, no, no, no – we’re a winery, so we have a shareholder. We’re important for our shareholder because our dividend helps support their operations and activities and their work. So we have for our wine, probably quite strong distribution in New Zealand; probably about seventy to eighty percent or so of our wine is domestic … eighty to ninety is domestic, and the rest is export. We’re trying to develop our export market but our brand is not all that well known overseas; but our brand is quite strong in New Zealand. We’ve got quite good distribution through the supermarkets, but most of the market in New Zealand is for wines in the $10 to $20 price bracket; so that’s where we operate. We manage to make it work even though it’s very, very, very competitive and the profitability of wineries has been compromised over the last ten or so years – ever since the global financial crisis really, it’s become quite difficult. And the distribution system is tough as well, because basically we’ve got a duopoly; we’ve got two big supermarket chains, and … yeah, so that’s quite a challenge. But we do a bit of other third-party work for other customers, so that’s part of our winemaking mix. So for example, I think we put through close to three million litres last year, and I think we bottled about a couple of million litres of that. We’ve got two brands, the Mission brand, and four years ago we acquired the Stables brand which was known as Ngatarawa Wines, but now it is our brand.

So what else? Our vineyards used to be concentrated all in Hawke’s Bay, and prior to about 2011 we were quite heavily reliant on growers and our own vineyards; but back in 2012 after the global financial crisis, we managed to pick up a vineyard in Marlborough … seventy-hectare vineyard … which has been very, very useful for us, particularly seeing as the market has become so difficult in the last ten years. So this has given us a supply of Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc, and Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc makes up about eighty percent of New Zealand’s wine exports. It’s so important in the overseas market, so that’s been strategically, very, very good for us to acquire that vineyard; that’s helped our business immensely.

We also have this vineyard here, which is quite sort of heavy country, sort of loams, and it’s suitable for mid-tier wines. We have two vineyards on the Gimblett Gravels – the first we acquired in ‘93; the second in about 2003, and they supply fruit for our high-end wine that we sell at over the $20 price point, you know, and these are barrel-aged wines. We only do about a hundred and twenty or so thousand litres of these barrel-aged wines, so that’s wines for the high end of the market. So we are trying to operate in that end of the market but it’s quite difficult, because in New Zealand there’s not a very, very high demand for full-bodied or expensive whites or reds. But anyway, that’s part of our mix; but the core of the mix that the winery ticks is these wines that we sell in the $10 to $20 price points. We’ve got wines under Ngatarawa brand like Pinot Gris and Sauvignon Blanc, that on promotion, you know, are under $12, and they’re good quality wines. They’re good, and I know that they match up some of the wines out in the market there that sell for $40, $50 and $60 or more. With our winery, because we’ve got this extra scale now and we’ve got good efficiencies, our costs of production are quite low, so we can actually produce wines that meet those price points that are of high quality, and still manage to be able to deliver a dividend for our shareholder.

What’s your responsibility being the chief winemaker?

Oh, overall responsible for the winery production. Twenty years ago I used to do all the purchasing of the dry goods; even do maintenance of the bottling line; run the lab; [laboratory] monitor the fermentations. I used to do a great big range of stuff, but now we’ve grown to a point where to cover some of those tasks that I was doing over twenty years ago, we’ve got now, like, a logistics planner, a production planner; those two look after our bottling and exports. And then I have two winemakers plus another person that [who] works in the lab; plus we run a bottling line – I’ve got a guy running that, and we have half a dozen bottling staff; we have three people in the warehouse now dispatching orders and preparing export orders. Yeah, and then we have sort of three or four people also working in the cellar doing all the winemaking. So my job is more sort of management, less hands-on; I still do quite a bit of hands-on work from time to time. I’m involved with like strategic planning and aspects of the human resources and that sort of thing, so the overall running of this winery’s my responsibility. So it’s very different from when Stuart was here, you know … Stuart Cuttance, Brother Stuart.

Another thing we do is we run an environmental management system; we’ve been doing that for about twenty years now, and we have ISO14001 accreditation which audits our environmental management system. And through the initiatives of that I guess the main thing is, you know, the environmental impact of our operations; if you like we try and be as green or environmentally conscious as possible, or conscious of the environment and the way our operations are impacting the environment. So this works around water use, waste use, energy use; so we have, like, really, really low energy use considering the amount of wine that we’re producing. Our company’s got a very, very low carbon footprint, yeah. Yeah, ‘cause we don’t use any fossil fuels or anything in the winery to run boilers or anything like that. So, you’d better ask me some questions.

Twenty years ago, how many hours were you putting in a week then?

Oh, much the same. Throughout the year [it] tends to be like a … you know, forty to forty-five hour week. But I come in quite a bit on the weekend; sometimes I often need to, to monitor refrigeration or do whatever. But over the vintage time the hours are longer; you know, get up to about sixty or so hours a week. But back in the 1980s and 90s when our equipment wasn’t that good, even though we were doing much smaller tonnage, typically over the vintage months, you know, you’d have a month where you’d be working seventy or eighty-hour weeks. And that’s quite physical work too, you know, so if you do an eighty hour work [week] in a physically demanding work environment, you tend to feel quite tired. But the vintage is quite … it’s quite an interesting part of the year; you get very, very focused on the production and getting the harvest in, so there’s a lot more to focus on.

And there are aspects that impact on not only our viability as a business or our sustainability as a business, but the sustainability and viability of other businesses such as you know, our growers, for example, you know … sort of thing like harvest decisions and that sort of thing that myself in conjunction with the viticulturist and the winemakers, we have to make. So that’s one thing about this job, it’s quite different; so, you know, you’ve got ten months of the year you’re running this production; you know, this winemaking and bottling, but then you have the two months of vintage where you’re actually producing the wines when you have the grape intake. And yeah, the whole focus changes. That’s what makes the job I guess, challenging and interesting; and every vintage is different, you know, and you face different challenges every year. But with experience you do know how to take on those challenges, you know, without getting too stressed about it.

I guess the weather … that’s the one thing that you can’t predict beforehand?

No, no – that’s right, no. So we were going into a … I think, La Nina this year; often those have quite wet vintages. We’ve had three quite good dry vintages, and this summer was supposed to be La Nina, and it’s supposed to be you know … possibly, in the years we’ve had La Ninas … we often have like, quite heavy rainfall during the grape maturation time which puts a lot of disease pressure on the ripening fruit; and sometimes grapes have to be harvested at sub-optimal levels of maturity. But again, we’ve had like, ‘19, ‘20, ‘21; so this is another year where we’ve had good settled weather through the autumn and we’ve been able to hang the fruit, get it fully mature, and as a consequence, you know, we’ve had you know, this is about the third or fourth good vintage in a row.

Sometimes you’ll get a year like 2017, where you get like a big dump of rain came through in February … quite heavy rain. And then we had another one in mid-March, you know. That was when the reds were getting close to maturity, so that put a lot of disease pressure, so we had to harvest – you know, we were out there making harvest decisions, basically you know, to save the fruit. But the 2017 vintage turned out all right; I mean, the wines weren’t as say, good as in years such as this latest one, but they were okay; they were just a bit lighter.

So you can say you’ve had a good vintage this year?

Yep, yep, yep. Around harvest, you know, you get to a point where you’re into sort of like, risk management. Yeah. So a year like 2017 … we had another very, very big heavy dump of rain in April; yeah, very wet. So we get vintages like that. And another one which was even worse than that, or more difficult than that was 2012, where not only did we have a cold summer – at least the summer in 2017 was hot – but in 2012 we had a cold summer and a wet vintage; so that was a very challenging vintage. So we have good ones and bad ones.

And so in the good times you put some funds aside to cover bad times?

Ah, yeah, we tend to do that, yeah. So what we call the vintage wines, or the high quality wines, we will tend to make more in the top years to give ourselves like, a bit of a buffer, yeah.

What about Cyclone Bola, that year?

That’s 1988, yeah, I remember that. Yeah, so that was

That would’ve been a bad year?

Yeah … the summer was okay. Things looked pretty good for a La Nina year, but it started … I think Gisborne got that far worse than us.

‘Cause they ended up with the rivers silting up and farmers losing their land. You can still see the scars …

In the hills.

Mmm.

I think the very, very heavy rainfall sort of stopped at Tangoio. I think Napier wasn’t hit so badly, but it still was very, very heavy. I remember that; we had a block of Chardonnay out here. The fruit was looking really, really good, and then that cyclone came along and it was like, two or three days of very, very heavy rain and then quite warm and humid. But we had a block, a Chardonnay year, and we thought, ‘Oh well, we’ll try and hang it’, you know, ‘it’ll dry out’; but it didn’t, it just collapsed. It sort of like how we had problems with disease pressure. We still made wine, but … yeah, I remember Cyclone Bola, yeah. Very, very wet; it wasn’t a great vintage because of that heavy cyclone. But saying that – I mean I think 2017, like we had about three very, very heavy rainfall events. But I think Gisborne got very, very badly hit. Yeah. I think there were some vineyards back then …

Did they get more or less wiped out?

No, no – well the water level rose; the river flooded, and some vineyards were actually submerged. So there were actually grapes still on the vine and harvested, and when the water subsided there was one particular block we got fruit from up there – came down in a truck – and the fruit had been underwater. And it was actually okay, it didn’t …

Hadn’t rotted or anything?

No, not rotten, it was okay. But we harvested, [background machinery noise] put it through the crusher; so the crusher de-stemmer gets rid of the stalks and of course, matter other than grapes; and – this is for machine harvested fruit – and what happened was a trout got harvested with the grapes [chuckle] and popped out the end of the crusher de-stemmer.

That sounds a tall story, Paul! [Chuckle]

It’s true.

What sort of trout was it, a brown trout or a rainbow trout?

Oh, it was just a little one, about one pounder.

That’s a fishy story! [Chuckle]

Oh, there’s lots of stories about Cyclone Bola. Yeah, it was really, really heavy.

Yeah – so in the eighties I think, we had quite good weather conditions I think, for grape growing in Hawke’s Bay. I think the nineties wasn’t all that good, really. Back in 1992 Mount Pinatubo … ‘89 and 1990 were very good vintage – and ‘91 – they were all three very good vintages … but then in ‘92 Mount Pinatubo erupted in the Philippines, and I don’t think there’s been as big an eruption since ‘cause it threw up so much dust into the upper atmosphere. I remember back then, back in the winter after this eruption, driving one day up to Auckland with the family, and the skies you know, in the middle of the afternoon, had this pink hue.

It’d be eerie.

Oh, it was weird; it was weird. But they had a pink hue, which reminds you a bit of the bush fires we had about a year or so ago, you know, you get this pink colouration. It was all because of all the particular matter chucked up in the atmosphere by this volcano. And the ‘92 vintage turned out all right, but it wasn’t a super hot summer; but the following summer, ‘92, ‘93, we had a spring and then we had an autumn. We didn’t have a summer. It was so cold. And it was so cool I think, the fruit just didn’t ripen.

So what do you do in that case?

Oh … and the crops were very light. Well, it was a year of poor wine quality, yeah, ‘cause the fruit just didn’t ripen very well. And then in the mid-nineties, we had sort of years … ‘95, a big dump of rain; ‘96 we had like, a year which wasn’t particularly good; ‘97 not particularly good; but then we’d have a run of quite good vintages like ‘98 – that was the El Nino year, so it was one of the hottest years, I think. That was a big, big El Nino event. I think that was so strong, that El Nino, that it had a big effect on global climate; I think there was a spike in global temperatures that year. But that was like, a very, very hot summer; and we’d never experienced anything quite like it, you know, so the fruit got very, very ripe.

And are there more people planting grapes at the moment?

Oh, it’s pretty static in Hawke’s Bay.

There’s still people planting grapes?

Oh, not a lot. There’s some, it’s static. Because there’s not a great awareness of Hawke’s Bay red wines overseas, like the Cabernets and Merlots …

You can’t get them overseas?

Oh no, it’s just a cost; because we’re growing in a cool climate our cost of producing fruit’s quite high. Typically, the cost of a ton of grapes … good ripe ready grapes … is $2,000 or more, a ton. In Australia or South America or Argentina or South Africa, I mean their costs … you can get fruit that might only cost you a fifth [of] that.

So do they drink more wine over there?

Well they’ve got warmer climates; so for red wine, which is what we’re trying to do at the top end, our red wine costs are just quite high. So when you do produce a very, very good red wine it’s up against you know, areas or countries where their cost of production is much, much lower, and it’s hard to compete. And it’s hard to compete with areas of France where they do have a higher standard of living and their costs are higher, but they’ve got massive subsidies … EU [European Union] subsidies; we don’t have any subsidies. Now the Labour Government got rid of the subsidies back in the eighties, didn’t they?

They had fun doing that, didn’t they? [Chuckles] But as I said, New Zealand is such a young country; we haven’t got the history like, for growing grapes like France and these other countries.

Oh … yeah, but we’ve come a long way, especially in the last twenty years, with our viticulture. I did a vintage in France in 1985, and it was just … the standard and quality of viticulture was just amazing. We’ve come back here; I think over the last twenty years we’ve made strides, you know, and I think that our fruit quality when we get it right like in the last three years or so, I think our wines compare with – sometimes – wines that are, you know, fine French wines which are much, much more expensive, you know, than ours. So we are actually producing at the top end, very, very high quality wine; very, very high standard of wines that I know will age beautifully for ten or twenty years, you know – which is aspiration of some of the great wine producing regions in France and Italy and Germany. But it’s just that our scale is so small you see. So Merlot and Cabernet and Syrah – all those three varieties, they’re all up in Hawke’s Bay; we’re producing what? About sort of fifteen thousand tons, you know, which is like such a tiny drop in the ocean compared to say, Bordeaux, where they make these styles of wine. So their production is probably going to be three or four hundred thousand tons of these varieties, and what are we doing? Ten or fifteen thousand, because our scale is so small. So because we don’t have the scale there’s no awareness of our wines overseas.

But the exception to that is Marlborough, where you’ve got almost a monoculture of Sauvignon Blanc. So there, from Marlborough, you know … I think you’re looking at two hundred and fifty thousand tons of fruit a year, and that’s the sort of scale; you’ve got to get up to that scale I think, if you’re going to actually make a blip on the global markets. And Marlborough have done it with Sauvignon Blanc, which is incredible.

How much travel have you done with your job?

Oh, not much, no. I did a vintage in France in ‘85, but that’s all really. Oh, I’ve had a few trips overseas, yeah; two or three to Europe, and three or four to conferences and so on in Australia; but yeah, not much.

I see by your age that you could be retired, sir?

Oh … something to think about, but I don’t know. I’m still useful around here so I might as well carry on working. I’ve still got a son at home, a seventeen-year-old son, so yeah, once he leaves … he’ll be leaving next year … things will change, my position will change; but I don’t have plans.

Have you had time for hobbies?

Oh … yeah, I used to do a bit of trout fishing. I was a member of a golf club for a bit, but not a very good player; used to quite enjoy trout fishing quite a bit. Before I married I used to get into hang-gliding for a bit; that’s quite good. Since my wife died, I don’t know, I just haven’t had that much time to engage in hobbies.

So you’ve got how many children?

Five.

How many girls? They‘ll keep you busy.

Yeah, they have, yeah. Yeah – they sort of tend to they keep me engaged.

That’s good, though?

Mmm. Yes, so you talk to them on the phone and stuff, and yeah, they come and visit you from time to time which is nice, always good.

You’re lucky. Paul, on behalf of the Knowledge Bank and myself, I’d like to thank you very much for letting me interview you today, and we wish you all the best for the future.

Oh, thank you.